In forth coming years, the internet and digital technology will be a stair of growth for the Indian economy. Today, anyone can become an entrepreneur, a designer, or a developer, but it is important for digitization to possess the right tools and skills to. We believe it is important for us to provide training and equipping the individuals and small businesses to speed up their journey of growth. These are the words of Sundar Pichai from Google.

India has around 51 million small and medium businesses (SMBs) today that contribute over 37% to India’s GDP. Out of which, only 32% are online or are using the power of the digital. In 2017, Google India wants to digitally empower the rest 68%.

Pichai, reaffirmed Google’s commitment to SMBs at an event in New Delhi in Q1 of 2017.

Encouraging SMBs makes a perfect business sense. As a joint study between Google and KPMG named Impact of internet and digitization on SMBs in India stated that 52% of digital businesses cater to customers outside their city, employ five times more people than businesses that are offline while profits of digitally engaged SMBs grow twice as fast compared to offline SMBs. The research also found that rising penetration and greater uptake for digital by SMBs could help increase their contribution to India’s GDP by 10 percentage points, taking it up to 46-48% by 2020.

To motivate the 68% of SMBs that are still not on the internet, Pichai announced the Digital Unlocked training program for business owners in India that will illustrate them with important digital skills that will help them to get online and start using the internet to grow and expand their business. The programme is built across the various platforms of online, offline and mobile app. The offline training is being organized in association with FICCI and 5,000 workshops will be conducted across 40 Indian cities in the next three years. The online training consists of a set of 90 self-learning video tutorials, built significantly for India and is available free of cost. The tutorial course cover a definite set of topics starting from building a web presence and increasing online growth to reaching customers using mobile and video.

All trainings are certified by Google, Indian School of Business and FICCI.

Moreover, Google also launched a free mobile app, Primer that is designed to teach digital marketing skills in a fast, easy and interactive way. It is available for download through the Google Play and iOS app store. Primer also works offline without the internet and is currently available in English and Hindi with Tamil, Telugu and Marathi language integrations.

Google’s efforts are in continuation to support Digital India.

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